You can reach the mountaintop, but you can't stay there, says author, who teaches at Central College in Pella. He'll discuss the book Saturday in Des Moines.

Mar. 14, 2014

Joshua Dolezal / Special to the Register

Written by

Special to the Register

More professor memoirs

Neil Nakadate, Iowa State University professor emeritus, will read from and discuss his memoir of three generations of his family — a gathering of history, memories, and personal reflection. During World War II, 110,000 Japanese Americans were removed from their homes and incarcerated by the U.S. government. In “Looking After Minidoka,” these “internment camp” years become a prism for understanding Japanese American experience from immigration through the 20th century. 10 a.m. April 12 at Iowa Humanities Festival, Salisbury House, Des Moines. 7 p.m. April 23 as part of the Des Moines Public Library AViD series.

Meet the author

Joshua Dolezal will read from “Down From The Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging” (University of Iowa Press) at 2 p.m. Saturday at Beaverdale Books, 2629 Beaver Ave., Des Moines and 7:30 p.m. April 10 at Central College’s Geisler Library in Pella.

More

ADVERTISEMENT

Joshua Dolezal arrived in Iowa after years dancing a “tango of escape and pursuit” and saw a lost landscape.

“Corn stood along the highways like prison bars, and the river bore the filth of feedlots upstream,” the Montana native wrote in “Down From the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging” (University of Iowa Press), a new memoir he will discuss Saturday at Beaverdale Books.

As the title suggests, he descends from on high, but it took a few years.

“When I first came here, I didn’t make an effort to see. I saw the Midwest as an anti-wilderness. You don’t have any place to walk off the grid,” said Dolezal, 38, in an interview.

The associate professor of English at Central College in Pella had bought into what he calls a cultural bias against the Midwest and a national conversation about the natural landscape that privileges the American West.

Then one summer after his classes wrapped up, he stayed instead of taking off for the mountains. Not out of choice. He was called to jury duty.

He was determined not to mope all summer. He took off on his bicycle and pedaled long hours in the countryside. He decided to grow a garden. He met a woman who he would eventually marry.

He began to experience Iowa from the ground, digging his hands into the soil, and seeing Iowa on a micro scale. “On that micro scale,” he said, “I’ve seen a lot of wilderness.”

A transplant’s newfound appreciation feels good to us. Yet Iowa is one of the most biologically-altered states in the U.S. Is it a sell-out to the locals?

Dolezal doesn’t think so, and credits two people for seeing deeper.

One is Ogden artist David Williamson, best- known among Iowans as the man who constructs elaborate sculptures out of river trash, who could bear witness to waste yet “see vestiges of beauty in the landscape.”

“There is a balance between finding beauty in every place and using that as a form of denial over things that are destructive,” Dolezal said.

He didn’t deny the difficulty in finding an acreage not surrounded by farmers blasting crops with chemicals.

But Dolezal could still admire the white pelican that had found enough to like in that Des Moines River valley by his home near Pella.

“(Pelicans) have become my touchstone for my own sense of balance,” he said.

The other influence was famed Nebraska poet Ted Kooser, who once taught writing to Dolezal in graduate school. Dolezal still repeats a line of his:

“If you can awaken within the familiar, you need never leave home.”

He started to see the roots in the Iowa dirt.

In northwest Montana, Dolezal grew up the son of back-to-the-land parents who grew their own food, read the Bible every night before dinner and burned with Pentecostal faith.

But he recognized a righteousness in himself.

“No matter how much I imagined myself as a soldier of light, no matter how much I feigned civility,” he wrote, “the sad fact was I did not understand how to separate conviction from judgment.”

He moved away for college, fell away from the religion of his parents and began the wandering to find his place.

The narrative of the young in rural America is always about leaving, he said, not about being committed to home.

His leaving took him to the Great Plains, where he felt different because of the way he grew up, wearing homemade clothes, born into his father’s hands instead of a doctor’s.

In college essays, he could explain his difference. He could make sense of things. When his studies finally brought him to Iowa to teach, he recognized he had to stop and really look around him, like he had told his students to do in their writing.

He began to see the flat land as a counter to the mountaintop as the typical metaphor for success.

“I don’t think we have words or tropes for beauty on the prairie landscape,” he said.

When you reach a mountain’s peak, or speak in tongues in church, it may be a transcendent moment. But you can’t climb up the mountain and stay there, he said. You have to come down.

“There is a futility in placing all our metaphors in a place you visit and leave,” he said.

On the prairie landscape, every day, ordinary life is charged with significance. You stay. You grow.

“I find that rewarding in defining home,” he said.

Dolezal has been changed by Iowa.

He has prized the sense of community over the rugged individualism of the West and Iowa modesty over perpetually seeking distinction.

He has married and had a daughter. He has already started the seeds for another growing season.